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November/December 2011 Featured Stories
The Deep Truth: Science is Evolving

by Gregg Braden

During the last years of the Cold War, I had a front row seat as a senior systems designer in the defense industry to one of the most frightening times in the history of the world, and the thinking that led to it.

During the last years of the most potentially lethal, yet undeclared, war in human history, the super powers of the United States and the former Soviet Union did something that seems unthinkable to any rationally minded person today. They spent the time, energy and human resources to develop and stockpile somewhere in the neighborhood of 65,000 nuclear weapons — a combined arsenal with the power to microwave the Earth, and everything on it, many times over.

The rationale for such an extreme effort stems from a way of thinking that has dominated much of the modern world for the last 300 years or so, since the beginning of the scientific era. It’s based in the false assumptions of scientific thinking that suggest we’re somehow separate from the Earth, separate from one another, and that the nature that gives us life is based upon relentless struggle and survival of the strongest.

Fortunately, new discoveries have revealed that each of these assumptions is absolutely false. Unfortunately, however, there is a reluctance to reflect such new discoveries in mainstream media, traditional classrooms and conventional textbooks. In other words, we’re still teaching our young people the false assumptions of an obsolete way of thinking based in struggle, competition and war.

While we no longer face the nuclear threat that we did in the 1980s, the thinking that made the Cold War possible is still in place. This fact is vital to us all right now for one simple reason: For the first time in human history the future of our entire species rests upon the choices of a single generation — us — and the choices are being made within a small window of time — now.

The best minds of our time are telling us that we must act quickly to avert the clear and present danger of a host of new crises that are converging in a “bottleneck” of time covering the first years of the 21st century.

According to Scientific American, the way we solve the simultaneous crises — such as our response to climate change, the unsustainable and growing levels of extreme poverty, the emergence of new diseases, the growing shortages of food and fresh drinking water, the growing chasm between extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and the unsustainable demand for energy — will chart the destiny, or seal the fate of our global family that is estimated to reach a staggering 8 billion by 2025.

The key is that the way we address the crises of our time is based on the way we think of ourselves and the world. Maybe it’s no coincidence that today, after three centuries of using the scientific method to answer the most basic questions about ourselves, the world has found itself facing the greatest crises of war, suffering and disease in recorded history.

Our old ways of thinking — which include believing in the need for competition, our separation from nature and the Darwinian tenet “let the strongest live and the weakest die” —  have brought us to the brink of disaster. Clearly, the thinking that led to the war and suffering of the 20th century, including the Cold War, is not the thinking that we want the delicate choices of our survival based upon.

The Hope

In recent years, an explosion of new discoveries throughout the sciences has left little doubt that many long-standing views about life, our world and our bodies have to change. The reason is simple: The ideas are wrong.

In light of the new evidence regarding near–ice age civilizations, the false assumptions of human evolution, the origin and role of war in our past, and the undue emphasis on competition in our lives today, we must rethink the most basic scientific beliefs that lie at the core of the decisions we make and the way we live. This is where the new deep truths of science come in.

Deep Truths

During a conversation with Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr once shared his insight into our deep and mysterious relationship regarding what we think of as “truth.” In clear and eloquent terms he stated, “It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.”

In other words it’s what Bohr called the “negation” of old scientific assumptions (meaning discoveries that it no longer make sense in the presence of new evidence) that makes the opposite of those assumptions a deep truth. And this is where the news of recent scientific discoveries becomes a proverbial double-edged sword.

The good news is that the new information gives us an updated and presumably more correct way of thinking about things. The downside is that entire paradigms have already been built upon the false assumptions. Everything from the curricula approved by school boards and taught in our classrooms, to the careers of teachers, authors and academics whose lives have been devoted to teaching the paradigm — along with the political decisions and policies that have been made into law in the highest courts of the land — is based upon what is accepted as “true” in our culture.

We may well discover that our beliefs about global warming, the role of competition in global economies, when we choose to save a life, when we choose to take a life and the reasons for war, for example, fall precisely into this category of deep truth.

As we face the greatest number and magnitude of crises in recorded history, the facts revealed by six areas of discovery radically change the way we’ve been led to think about our world and ourselves in the past. They include:

Deep truth 1: Our ability to defuse the crises threatening our lives and our world hinges upon our willingness to accept what science is revealing about our origins and history.

Deep truth 2: The reluctance of mainstream educational systems to reflect new discoveries, and explore new theories, keeps us stuck in obsolete beliefs that fail to address the greatest crises of human history.

Deep truth 3: New discoveries of advanced civilizations dating to near the end of the last ice age provide insights into solving the crises in our time, that our ancestors also faced in their time.

Deep truth 4: A growing body of scientific data from multiple disciplines, gathered using new technology, provides evidence beyond any reasonable doubt that humankind reflects a design put into place at once, rather than a life-form emerging randomly through an evolutionary process over a long period of time.

Deep truth 5: More than 400 peer-reviewed studies have concluded that violent competition and war directly contradict our deepest instincts of cooperation and nurturing. In other words, at the core of our truest nature we simply are not “wired” for war.

Deep truth 6: The key to addressing the crises threatening our survival lies in building partnerships based upon mutual aid and cooperation to adapt to the changes, rather than in pointing fingers and assigning blame, which makes such vital alliances difficult.

No one knows for certain what the future holds. But no matter which challenges await us or which choices we’ll be faced with, one thing is absolutely certain: Knowing who we are and understanding our relationship to one another, as well as to the world beyond, gives us the evolutionary edge to tip the scales of life and balance in our favor. And it all begins with our awareness of the deepest truths of our existence, and how we rely on those truths each day for every choice in our lives.

Gregg Braden is a New York Times best-selling author, and author of the new book,  Deep Truth. Excerpted with permission by Hay House at www.hayhouse.com.

 

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